tougher than President Obama’s, but, apart from the rhetoric, his policies sound little different from Obama’s.
For example, Romney has been saying for months that he would station one aircraft carrier permanently in the Persian Gulf area and one in the Mediterranean to counter Iran. But Obama has now ordered two carriers kept permanently on station near the Persian Gulf. There is no permanent carrier in the Mediterranean, but Romney failed to explain how a carrier stationed there, with many of its planes out of range of Iran, would accomplish anything.
This is a common problem for many presidential candidates on many policy issues. They need to show how they will do things differently than the incumbent for electoral purposes, but often, when faced with real-world options, they do the same thing.
Obama made much of his willingness to talk to Iran. But President George W. Bush had joined the European talks with Iran before the fall 2008 political campaign. Obama as president not only kept Bush’s clandestine effort to damage Iranian centrifuges, he even reappointed the under secretary of the Treasury, Stuart Levy, the Bush appointee who created the very effective banking restrictions that first started to do real damage to Iran’s economy.
The only change from Bush to Obama was that Obama acted less militant and that reassured European allies that Washington would not pursue “cowboy” policies. Now Europe has signed on to tougher sanctions than even Bush had proposed—although that is not the result of Obama, but of intransigence from Tehran that convinced Europe Bush was right when he got fed up with talking with Tehran. But to get to that point, Obama had to embrace talks so that Europe saw the problem was not intransigence in Washington but in Tehran.
On his trip to the Middle East this past week, it looked like Romney had made one real change from Obama. An adviser, Dan Senor, told reporters that as president Romney would “respect” an Israeli decision to attack Iran unilaterally.
Only hours later, Romney backpedaled. He issued a statement that did not say he would respect an Israeli decision to attack Iran. His statement said: “I’ll use my own words and that is I respect the right of Israel to defend itself and we stand with Israel. We’re two nations that come together in peace and that want to see Iran being dissuaded from its nuclear folly.”
Obama could just as easily have said that.
Romney’s rhetoric is more militant and warlike than Obama’s. But the substance isn’t really different. Back in March, Obama explained why he is more restrained in rhetoric. “Loose talk of war,” he said, serves only to jack up oil prices. “Now is not the time to bluster,” he said. “Now is the time let our increased pressure sink in and sustain the broad international coalition we have built.” (Many analysts suspect one purpose of Iran’s generally hotheaded rhetoric is to bolster oil prices.)
In one recent broadside against Obama’s Middle East policies, Romney blamed the president for the Arab uprisings, arguing that he could have headed them off by pressing the region’s autocrats to reform first. He did not mention that Republicans in 1980 blamed President Jimmy Carter for causing the Iranian revolution by pressing the Shah to reform and thereby weakening him.
The New York Times looked at what the two candidates have said and commented: “Once the incendiary flourishes are stripped away, the actual foreign policy differences between the two seem more a matter of degree and tone than the articulation of a profound debate about the course of America in the world today.”
The Times pointed to a recent debate between campaign surrogates at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. It reported the Romney speaker said Romney would be tougher in stopping Iran’s nuclear program. But, the Times said, he “outlined the same tools used by Mr. Obama: sanctions to force negotiations, with the option of military action on the table.”
Romney just last week gave his position on using military force against Iran: “We will employ every means short of military power. We recognize that if all means are exhausted and fail, a military option will have to be considered.”
Obama has said the same thing in almost the same words before. Note that Romney didn’t even say he would attack if all other options failed. He said merely that “a military option will have to be considered” in such a case.
Romney also said military intervention in Iran “is by far the least attractive option, but it should not be ruled out.” Again, Obama has used that same formulation.
In March, Obama said “all elements of American power” are available to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, including “a military option to be prepared for any contingency.”